NY Times #1 bestselling author Eric Metaxas finds meaning of the universe in a dream

There's no such thing as blind faith. The whole idea of blind faith is a misunderstanding of faith. Faith can only be faith in what is real. This ridiculous idea, which is so popular in our culture, that if you want to believe you got to check your brain at the door, that's absurd. I mean, it's totally wrong.

Some of the greatest minds I've ever met, people that are just extraordinary, brilliant, thoughtful, emotionally intelligent, emotionally mature people, are people of faith in Jesus. And, I think the tragedy of our culture and the culture that I grew up is that you don't really see evidence of that.

My dad came from Greece in 1955, my mom came from Germany in 1954. They met in an English class in New York City, in Manhattan. We went to the Greek church and it was a wonderful community. It was a warm community, but it was mainly a community built around the idea of being Greek. That's where the Greeks hung out, in the church. It was an ethnic community, but it was not really very much a community of faith.

My identity was getting good grades, being the smart kid and so I just assumed that I should go to some good school. That was not part of the culture that I grew up in. I went to a public school in Danbury, Connecticut. Nobody's talking about wanting to go to these Ivy League schools. Of course, you don't know what you're getting into.

I have no clue and I'm so open minded. I had no idea what I believed or who I was. It got tough. It was very unpleasant.

But, I remember going to college and really thinking I don't know what I believe. I have no clue and I'm so open minded that in an environment like Yale, particularly, it's a very secular environment. You know, by the time I graduated I was really, absolutely at sea, I had no idea what I believed or who I was. It got tough. It was very unpleasant.

I was 24, moved back in with my folks, and my European immigrant parents were not thinking, "Oh, Eric must be a poet, a writer, he's finding himself." Their attitude is "You should find yourself a job." The only thing I could do to make a buck was I got a job as a proof reader at Union Carbide. It was an awful, awful time, to work at a corporate environment as somebody who thinks himself a humorous and a poet and it was just horrible.

In the middle of this agony, I met a guy. He was a graphic designer at Union Carbide, a little bit older than I was. He had a wife and a kid and he befriended me. We'd just hang out and talk. He clearly was serious about his Christian faith. For a long time, that made me uncomfortable, because I'd been trained at Yale. We avoid people like this, these are weird people.

I remember this guy saying to me, "Eric, you should pray that God will reveal himself to you." And I remember thinking that makes absolutely no sense, because if I don't even know if God's there, how am I going to pray to him? I don't even if he exists.

I was blown away by the intellectual concept that you're praying to this God that you think can heal people. So, it's not just some vague energy force. You believe there is this God who cares.

But, if you are in enough pain you'll do stupid stuff. So, I'd be jogging and, in my pain, I would just pray to God, "I need a sign. I'm just trapped. I'm trapped in my own mind, in my own way of seeing the world, there's just no way out."

Then my uncle Takis, he had a stroke. I remember this friend of mine, Ed Tuttle, the graphic designer, said to me that some of the folks at his church were praying for my uncle and I'll never forget that I was blown away by the kindness of this.

I said, "Wow, that's kind of amazing, that you don't even know my uncle and you and people in your church are praying for my uncle."

And I also was blown away by the intellectual concept that you're praying to this God that you think can heal people. So, it's not just some vague energy force. You believe there is this God who cares. I was moved. I wasn't persuaded that this is real, but I was just moved by the concept of it.

And then one day that week, he asked me, "Would you like to pray for your uncle?"

And I said "Yeah."

Up until then I was like, "No, I don't want to pray, or do anything weird, go to church, or do Bible study." But my uncle's sick, let's go pray.

And so he takes me to this bleak, fluorescent lit conference room at Union Carbide, just awful, and we go in there and close the door and he prays. I close my eyes, I had never done this before, ever. Now, imagine, I grew up in a church. I was an altar boy. Nobody prays, actually prays, like that.

God was speaking to me with what I call a secret vocabulary of my heart. This dream would have meant nothing to anyone else. It would have been just bizarre.... It's like this paragraph just dropped into my head. God has just one-upped me.

My uncle passed away but I remember at the funeral, the priest asked me if I would read the Psalms. It was just kind of this thing, I thought, yeah, I want to do that. Like something was engaged basically for the first time.

And right around this time, I had a dream, around my 25th birthday, so 25 years ago. I had a dream and that dream changed everything. It was like a life changing, mind blowing dream. In the dream, I'm standing on Lake Candlewood in Danbury, Connecticut. It's winter. I'm standing on the ice. I'm ice fishing with my buddy John and his dad.

It's one of those glorious winter days where the sun is bright, the sky is incredibly blue, there's white snow and ice. We're standing there and I look down into the hole were we were fishing and there is a fish sticking its snout out of the hole. Now, if you ice fish, you may know that that never happens.

I reach down and I pick it up. I hold it up. And, in the dream, the light from the sun was so bright, and it shone on the side of this fish in a way that it made it look not bronze, but actually golden, like it was made of gold. Then, suddenly, in the dream I realize that, no, it's not looking gold, it's not just appearing to be gold, it's actually golden. I'm holding up a living golden fish.

"Eric, you wanted to touch water, you wanted to touch inert water, this collective unconscious, this Eastern idea of this God force, but I have something else for you. I have my Son, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, your Savior."

The way I look at the dream, in retrospect, is that God was speaking to me with what I call a secret vocabulary of my heart. This dream would have meant nothing to anyone else. It would have been just bizarre. In my twenties, after college, I finally came up with what I thought was a suitable answer to the meaning of the universe. I came up with this idea that, okay, it's kind of a literary image, you have a frozen lake. The ice on the lake represents the conscious mind. And, the water beneath the ice represents the unconscious mind, with a collective unconscious and so that's Carl Jung's idea of God, this kind of Eastern God force. And so the goal of life and of all religions is basically the same, it's to drill through the ice, the conscious mind, to reach the collective unconscious.

This was this kind of idea that I had come up with. So when I had the dream, obviously, it has unbelievable resonance. I'm holding this fish and I realize in the dream, it's like this paragraph just dropped into my head...boom, boom...like I know. God has just one-upped me with my own simple system. In the dream, I'm aware, looking at this golden fish, like it's out of a fairy tale, that God has just said to me, without a word, "Eric, you wanted to touch water, you wanted to touch inert water, this collective unconscious, this Eastern idea of this God force, but I have something else for you. I have my Son, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, your Savior."

This was huge. In fact, I remember specifically, and this has meaning here, that when we would see the fish on the back of a car, the chrome fish, when they started popping up, in the 70's, my father got really excited about telling me that this is a Greek word, that the Greek word for fish is Ichthys. And that's an acronym Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr, (Jesus Christ, Son of God, our Savior). That's where the Christians came up with the fish symbol.

So, in the dream I instantly knew all this came together and just blew my mind. You know, it was transcendent. I went to work the next day, and I told my friend, Ed Tuttle, that I had this dream and he says: "What do you think that means?" And I said "Well, it means I've accepted Jesus."

People have said, "Faith is a leap into the dark." Let's switch the cliches: "Faith is leap into the light." If it's not true, I don't want to believe it. If it's just kind of helping me, a little bit, but it's not ultimately true, then what are you believing in?

And I never, never would have said those words. I would cringe to say those words, in fact, I would have cringed if anybody else would say those words. I cringed when people said stuff like that. But I mean, what can I tell you? It was absolutely mind blowing.

People have said, "Faith is a leap into the dark." Let's switch the cliches: "Faith is leap into the light." If it's not true, I don't want to believe it. If it's just kind of helping me, a little bit, but it's not ultimately true, then what are you believing in?

I remember the guy who I was talking to, my graphic designer friend Ed Tuttle, shared with me a scripture before I had become a Christian. And it was that famous scripture from Jeremiah, where God says: "I know the plans I have for you. Plans not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

There is no doubt in retrospect that God is real. And I wish I'd known that a lot sooner. To think that I can grow up in a church and go to one of the finest universities and never encounter any credible witness of this kind of faith, that says a lot about the culture we live in. God didn't just create us. He invented the idea of us and he invented every single one of us. He knows us so intimately, so you cannot ever really know who you are apart from him. To know that my life is not a mistake, to know that my life is not meaningless, to really know, that's freedom. That's real freedom.

My name is Eric Metaxas, and I Am Second.

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